Sermon for the Feast of St. Matthias

admin| 24 February 2012

“For without me me ye can do nothing”

There is something rather terrifying about the feast of St. Matthias. He is the apostle chosen by lot to go “into the place of the traitor Judas,” as the Collect puts it. The Lesson from Acts is no less clear: one is chosen “that he may take his place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell.” That one is Matthias, now numbered with the eleven, making the eleven twelve.

We know virtually nothing about Matthias. Which is fine. It is more than enough to contemplate the idea that he has been chosen to take the place of the betrayer of Jesus. Yet it must seem an uncomfortable thought. Betrayals are difficult but necessary things to behold. To take the place of the traitor, it seems to me, must mean contemplating the betrayals in our own hearts. For it has to be said that we are all the traitors of Christ. We are all like Judas.

Such is the deep and grim reality of sin. Matthias is chosen to take his place. Not to be another traitor but in the face of human treachery and deceit to be a man of faith, steadfast and sure. “There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face” Shakespeare’s King Duncan, in the play MacBeth, says about the first Thane of Cawdor who was a traitor to the King. “He was one,” the King says, “upon whom I built an absolute trust.” At just that moment, MacBeth appears, MacBeth whom the King had just appointed the Thane of Cawdor in the place of the traitor. MacBeth would prove to be the far greater traitor. And unlike the first Thane of Cawdor who confessed and repented, it will not be said of MacBeth, as it was said of him, that “nothing became his life like his leaving it,” meaning a kind of nobility achieved through repentance and confession.

No. Matthias stands in the place of the traitor Judas but not as another traitor but one who knows the treachery of human hearts and the need for heavenly grace. And that, it seems to me, is the point of the Gospel reading that accompanies the lesson from Acts. Jesus says, “for without me ye can do nothing.”

In a way, that is the whole purpose of Lent. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. We go up with him. He explains the meaning of the journey, the things of betrayal and suffering and death and resurrection, but, of course, we understand “none of these things.” How are we to understand the treacheries and the betrayals of the human heart? It is altogether part and parcel of the pageant of Lent. Not our ‘achy-breaky hearts’ but our hearts of betrayal. We have to contemplate the far greater spectacle of the one who takes our place, the place of sinners, and who bears our sins in his body on the tree. Tough stuff and yet infused with blessedness.

To be Matthias in the place of Judas is only possible, it seems to me, through the heart-knowledge of human betrayals and through the overcoming of those betrayals by the one who is betrayed by us all and yet takes our place, Jesus Christ. His words in the last and, perhaps, greatest of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus are saving grace. “For without me ye can do nothing.” Only the grace of Christ crucified can conquer our treacherous hearts. His crucifixion reveals our hearts to us.

His grace overcomes our treachery. Only in that knowledge can Matthias take the place of the traitor Judas and become a member of the apostolic fellowship, the fellowship that is defined simply and entirely by the grace of Christ. His life moves in us “without which all our doings are nothing worth”. “If I have not love,” Paul explains in the Epistle reading from 1 Corinthians 13, “I am nothing.”

“Without me ye can do nothing”, Jesus says, recalling us to himself and to his victory over sin and wickedness. As the extended image of vine and branches suggests we only live when we live in the love of God. His life in us, without which we are nothing. And we abide in his love through the apostolic fellowship which his love creates and renews.